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Friday, October 18, 2013

Walking through London...

...with the young team from the SPES group. SPES is the St Patrick's Evangelisation School, based at St Patrick's, Soho. My job was to lead them in the first of a couple of History Walks. Their daily regime is challenging, starting early with prayers and breakfast and continuing through the day with lectures, Adoration of the Bl. Sacrament, Mass, Rosary, and a whole range of activities including a Maryvale course - gaining certificates by the end of the year - street evangelisation, meals for the homeless, etc etc.

So things began with a talk in their lecture-room at St P's, then Mass and a hearty lunch, at which we were joined by the parish priest Fr Alexander Sherbrook, and then we set off...visiting St Giles-in-the-Fields and learning the history of this area, its leper hospital etc, then on to Holborn and Lincoln Inn Fields (martyrs, Sardinian Embassy chapel, etc), and then the Temple Church (Crusades, Templars) and Fleet Street, and so on to St Paul's. We finished with big cups of tea near St Paul's...these young people are the World Youth Day, BXVI generation, very enthusiastic about evangelisation, with a sense of mission. They love to swap stories of WYD - "I celebrated my 16th birthday at World Youth Day at Cologne" "At Rio, praying together on the beach was just so amazing". They want to share their faith, conscious of the sense of loss and confusion among many of their peers who have never encountered Christ or who have been given only a vague distorted image of him...

It was now nearly 6pm, so as they went back to St Patrick's, I walked across the Millenium Bridge, for Evensong at Pr. Blood Church on the opposite bank. The sunset was extraordinarily beautiful, staining the sky pink beyond the done of St Paul's, long strands of glowing light trailing across the London skyline. It was low tide, with the rocky muddy shoreline making the river look more "homely" somehow, showing evidence of the years and years and years of human activities and homes and livelihoods that have been happening along its banks. People were beginning to pack into pubs and into the Globe, and teeming along to Waterloo or London Bridge stations. And so on to Precious Blood...Evensong, and the Psalms going back and forth. Deacon Scott was leading the service, and will be ordained on Saturday.